by Lao Tzu
Yet it remains that there are many remarkable correspondences between the Bhagavad Gītā and the Tao Te Ching. The most probable explanation is that the Bhagavad Gītā was transmitted to China in the same fashion that it was initially transmitted within India—by word of mouth. Particularly memorable images and powerful expressions would have been transferred virtually verbatim. In most instances, however, what the founders of Taoism absorbed from Yoga were radically new ideas concerning man and his place in the universe and a complementary physiological regimen (meditational discipline, dietary practices, flexing exercises, and so forth). Considering the immense linguistic, social, and philosophical differences between China and India, it is astounding that the kindredness of the Bhagavad Gītāā and the Tao Te Ching shines through so conspicuously.
I must now address the sensitive issue of the precedence of Yoga versus that of Taoism. Given the complexities of the dating of the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gītā, if we rely strictly on these two sources alone, it is conceivable (though unlikely) that the Chinese classic might have influenced the Indian scripture. Certain distinctive aspects of Yoga that also show up in Taoism can be traced back to India beyond the first millennium B.C. and are systematically described over and over at great length (see the Appendix). However, in China they only begin to appear at the earliest around the middle of the first millennium B.C. And they are presented in a confused and cursory fashion until after the advent of Buddhism around the first century A.D. when they are reinforced by a new and more coherently conveyed wave of Indian influence. In short, if Indian Yoga did not exert a shaping force upon Chinese Taoism, the only other logical explanation is that both were molded by a third source. Since no such source is known, we can only assume an Indian priority and wait for additional data from future archaeological discoveries. However, it is improbable that new data would significantly alter our present understanding, because the case in favor of Indian priority is already massive (see the Appendix for a sampling of the evidence).
There are so many correspondences between Yoga and Taoism—even in the smallest and oddest details—throughout the history of their development that we might almost think of them as two variants of a single religious and philosophical system. Both conceive of conduits, tracts, channels, or arteries through which the vital breath, or energy, flows. They view the main channel as originating in the “root,” or “tail,” region of the body, then passing through the spinal column and flanked by two subsidiary channels. At death, the energized soul of both the Yogin and the Taoist emerges from the bregma (junction of the sagittal and coronal sutures at the top of the skull) to merge with the world-soul (Brahman, Tao). This is called the Way to Brahman by Yogis and the Marrow Way by Taoists.
Both Yoga and Taoism maintain that there are certain points in the body where energy is held, or bound, and that there are supports that guide the vital breath. Both envisage wheels or fields where this energy generates heat. Practitioners of both disciplines are said to possess an outer radiance that reflects a refined inner essence. In their esoteric forms, both are obsessed with semen retention (said to repair the brain)—not a preoccupation of religious practitioners that one might expect to find springing up spontaneously in two such different cultures.
Yoga and Taoism also share a close association with internal and external alchemy. Both resort to the use of various charms, sacred syllables, and talismans as aids in meditation and for conveying secret knowledge. And both maintain that advanced accomplishment in their respective disciplines affords the practitioner special powers such as the ability to walk on water without sinking or on fire without getting burned. Claims of levitation have also been announced by those who style themselves Taoists and Yogins. These are only a few of the more obvious analogies between Taoism and Yoga.
By now, it is hoped that even the most hardened skeptic and the most ardent Chinese isolationist will admit that Yoga and Taoism bear such striking affinities to each other that they must be related in some fashion. But how do we account for this historically? It is commonly held that China was virtually cut off from the rest of humanity until about the middle of the second century B.c. This is simply wrong; fortunately archaeological discoveries and anthropological fieldwork are beginning to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that, with rare exceptions, all of mankind—including China—has been continuously interacting across the face of the globe since the origin of the species.
It is also often claimed that China and India did not have any significant cultural intercourse until the first century A.D. This, too, is false, for there is now available artifactual evidence of Buddhism in China from no later than the middle of the first century B.C. China is mentioned by name, particularly as the source of silk, in a number of still earlier Indian texts. Trade between India and China, through a variety of overland and ocean routes, flourished well before the sayings of the Old Master came to be written down. As suggested earlier, whenever trade occurs between two countries, mutual cultural borrowing is inevitable.
The flow of Indian intellectual and spiritual influence into China that resulted in the rise of Taoism was undoubtedly mediated by a complex mix of peoples from western and central Asia. The same process was repeated later during the penetration of Buddhism into the heartland of China when Persian-speaking peoples, among others, played a crucial role in its transmission. Also, just as with Buddhism, Indian ideas instrumental in the rise of Taoism must have been brought to the south and central Chinese coast by trading ships that sometimes carried religious personages, paraphernalia, and scriptures.
In any event, Taoism (as well as other aspects of Chinese civilization) certainly did not materialize in a vacuum. As more thorough archaeological and anthropological studies are carried out on the periphery of China and as more unrestricted philological studies are undertaken on early Chinese texts, it becomes increasingly apparent that Chinese civilization is an integral part of the development of world civilization. Those who attempt to seal it off hermetically from the rest of mankind, for whatever purpose, not only distort Chinese history but fail to comprehend the true nature of human history outside of China.
The Bhagavad Gītā and the Tao Te Ching are not the only instances of Sino-Indian interaction in the development of Taoism. Master Chuang, Master Lieh, and other early Taoist thinkers also reveal distinct Indian philosophical and thematic proclivities at the same time as they are quintessentially Chinese. Taoist religion, too, shares much with Indian Buddhism. Its canon, ecclesiastical establishment, hierarchy of deities, ritual, and rules for communal living were all inspired by Indian models, and yet they have been assimilated in a way that makes them seem very much at home in China. Taoism, in turn, laid the foundations for the rise of perhaps the most genuinely Chinese of all Buddhist sects, Ch’an, which we know in its Japanese guise as Zen (both of which names are truncated transcriptions of Sanskrit dhyāna [meditation]). The circles and cycles of cultural interflow never cease.
Part IV:
Sinological Usages and Principles of Translation
The topics that need to be discussed in this section are somewhat technical. However, for the sinologist and for those who are curious about what sinologists do, the following observations are vital.
Since there are so many different systems available for spelling out Chinese languages, I must first say a few words about the crucial distinction between spoken language and written script so that I can explain my own choice. Ideally, the Chinese script is a device for recording on a surface the sentiments and sounds of the languages. The script is definitely not equivalent to any of the spoken languages and, in many instances, there is an enormous gap between the two. We must be wary of using visual analysis of the ideographic and pictographic components of a character alone to arrive at the presumed meaning of the word from the spoken language it is meant to convey. The phonology of Chinese takes precedence over the script as it does with any language when one is trying to extract meaning. We also need to make a di
stinction between the various forms of extremely terse classical Chinese, which may never have been spoken, and the vernacular Sinitic languages, most of which have never been written down. The Tao Te Ching, naturally, is written in classical Chinese.
The transcription system used in this book is a slightly modified form of Wade-Giles romanization. Its chief competitor is Pinyin, which is the official romanization of the People’s Republic of China and is used mainly by students whose work focuses on China during the second half of this century. I have picked Wade-Giles because it remains the sinological standard for the spelling of Mandarin and because nearly all libraries continue to use it for the cataloguing of Chinese authors, titles, and subjects. Furthermore, of the various competing systems, Wade-Giles is actually closer than most to scientific notations such as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Above all, the title of the classic is already widely known in the English-speaking world by its Wade-Giles transcription. Conversion to another romanization would render the title unrecognizable to many who are already familiar with it as the Tao Te Ching.
There are only two transcribed terms (yin and yang) in the entire text, and these have already been accepted into English. Thus there is no need to set forth here the whole Wade-Giles system, but it does behoove us at least to learn the correct pronunciation of the title and the name of the presumed author, Lao Tzu (see this page, this page–this page). Tao sounds exactly like Dow (as in Dow-Jones), Te is pronounced like Duh (as in “Duh, I dunno” but with a rising intonation), and Ching is almost the same as Jean with a -g sound stuck on at the end. Hence, Tao Te Ching might be phonetically transcribed for American speakers as Dow Duh Jeang. The Lao part of Lao Tzu sounds like “louse” minus the final sibilant. Tzu sounds not like “zoo,” as many Americans tend to pronounce it, but rather like “adze” with the initial vowel missing.
As a matter of fact, neither the title Tao Te Ching nor the name Lao Tzu originally sounded the way we pronounce it now. The archaic reconstruction of the former is roughly drog-dugh-gwing and that of the latter is roughly ruwh-tsyuh. It is purely a sinological convention to cite ancient terms according to their modern standard Mandarin pronunciations. However, this is often quite misleading, since modern standard Mandarin is so far removed from the sounds of ancient Chinese languages that any resemblance between them is usually unrecognizable by all but those who are highly trained specialists. The problem is less severe for other modern Sinitic languages such as Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, which have preserved the ancient sounds to a much greater extent.
The dissonances between the realms of oral and written discourse in China pose enormous difficulties for the philologist, especially when he is dealing with a text like the Tao Te Ching, which had its origins in proverbial wisdom that first circulated orally and only came to be written down much later. During the transition from oral expression to written formulation in characters, a profound transformation occurred. What were once purely strings of sound possessed of rhythm, tone, accent, and pause that elicited in the mind of the auditor certain associated meanings became visual patterns spaced equidistantly on a flat surface that provided truncated semantic and phonetic clues to the thought of the author. Loquaciousness gave way to laconicism, affording great latitude to the imaginative interpreter.
The central role of imagination and intuition in the reading of classical Chinese accounts for the great diversity of opinion among the exegetes. It is for this reason that I have tried to reach beyond the commentators to the text of the Tao Te Ching and even, whenever possible, to get beyond the written text to the spoken language that inspired it. This may seem an impossible task to the novice, but there are rigorous linguistic methods that permit us to extrapolate from the terse written statements of the classics significant features of the oral formulations from which they were drawn. It is rather like the paleontologist’s recreation of a Devonian amphibian on the basis of a few fossilized bones, or the forensic reconstruction of an entire skull on the basis of a molar, a bicuspid, a mandible, half a maxilla, one ethmoid, and a quarter of the occipital bone.
Unlike nearly all other sinological translators of the Tao Te Ching, I place very little credence in the traditional commentators. More often than not, they simply lead one astray if one’s objective is to understand the Tao Te Ching itself rather than the commentator’s philosophical and religious programs. Because of a series of startling archaeological discoveries (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, jade plaques, pottery marks, etc.) during the course of this century, we know far more today about the development of the Chinese script and Sinitic languages than did scholars at any time in the past. This is not to deny that there are items of value in the work of the early commentators, only to caution that they are often egregiously wrong because they were limited both by their sources and their methods. Most important of all, we are in possession of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts, which are hundreds of years older and far more reliable than any previously known texts of the Tao Te Ching. Consequently, even though forty or fifty later editions sometimes agree on a certain reading, they may all be wrong simply because they did not have access to the early manuscripts.
The first principle of translation subscribed to herein is always to use the oldest available manuscript except when it is defective (that is, when it has lacunae, is torn, is illegible, etc.) or can be proven to be in error, in which case I rely on the next oldest text. When none of the early texts makes sense, I search for homophonous and near-homophonous cognates. Only when that fails to yield a reasonable reading do I suspect an orthographical error and begin to look for a character whose shape might have been mistaken for the one in question. My first assumption (borne out by many years of work on other ancient Chinese manuscripts) is that the author or scribe knew very well the sound of the word he wanted to record but was not always certain of the proper character that should be used to write it. I emend the text only as a last resort, which, fortunately, happens rarely in the present work.
This leads to the thorny matter of the chapters in the Tao Te Ching and whether or not they are legitimately applied to the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts, which are not marked consistently. I have numbered the chapters consecutively, according to the sequence they were found in the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts, while retaining in parentheses the conventional chapter divisions for easy reference for those already familiar with the Tao Te Ching. Readers will quickly notice that the order of the chapters in the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts is not the same as that of the received text. For example, the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts begin with chapter 38 of the received text, chapter 40 is preceded by 41, chapters 80 and 81 (the final chapters of the received text) come before 67, and so forth.
While not fully punctuated, the older of the two Ma-wang-tui manuscripts occasionally has scribal marks that indicate where pauses should be made and stanzas separated. This is often helpful for understanding the text, and it contrasts with the vast majority of classical Chinese texts written before this century that consist solely of very long strings of characters spaced equidistantly. It should be noted that the breaks marked on the older of the two Ma-wang-tui manuscripts do not always coincide with the chapter divisions of the received text.
The division into eighty-one chapters has no validity whatsoever in terms of the original collection of the Old Master’s sayings. Most of the chapters consist of two or more parts and are joined together for no particular reason other than the editors’ desire to have a neat package. Conversely, in several cases, portions of the Tao Te Ching that are separated by chapter breaks in the received text might better be joined together. One chapter (62), for example, begins with a conclusion (“Therefore …”).
It is futile to attempt to provide any rational basis for the division into eighty-one chapters since the number is purely arbitrary and has no organic bearing on the systematic ordering of the text. This particular number (ekāśīti in Sanskrit) was probably picked up from the Buddhists who favored it because it is the square of nin
e, which was itself fraught with all manner of symbolic significance for Indian mystics. One of the most hallowed Buddhist scriptures, the Prajñpāramitā-sūtra, also had eighty-one divisions. Even in the few sporadic instances where chapter divisions are marked in the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts, they do not always coincide with those in the received text. Nonetheless, for purposes of comparison and analysis I have divided my translation into the customary eighty-one chapters.
As for annotations, there are two different approaches that might have been followed. On the one hand, there is the heavily annotated translation that so bristles with technical flourishes as to scare away all nonsinologists. On the other hand, there is the translation that is totally devoid of commentary and that often leaves the lay reader guessing and wondering at every turn. I have tried to strike a happy balance between these two extremes by providing notes that would satisfy the curiosity or puzzlement of the beginner and the legitimate needs of the sinologist, but they appear at the back of the book so as not to clutter up the pages of the translation. For the same reason, the Notes are keyed to the text by line and word rather than by superscript numbers. In general, my aim has been to make the translation completely integral and self-explanatory. Thus, there should be no need to consult the Notes or the Afterword upon a first reading of the Tao Te Ching itself. The Notes and the Afterword are intended for those who reread the text and require additional commentary in the course of their deeper analysis and reflection.